Electro Boy clock/automatic timer

A fleamarket find, I had a hunch it would work even without any promises.

Grime made it looked worse, as if the plastic had melted at places but all wiped off nicely. 

It's not any kind of collectors item, I paid 2 euros and I'm seeing them going for similar prices in eBay. Boxed and with manuals it might fetch some more.

I didn't think much about the weird clock face and the fact it has an outlet for plugging in another device. I thought it was a cool-looking clock from 1960s/1970s. 

But it's not just a clock but a timing mechanism with on-off switches around the face.

From what I've seen, electric timers are usually sold separately as add-ons to the electric outlet, without any actual clock dials.

I've now learned the Electro Boy brand from Muller is quite old and there may be devices with similar function already from the 1950s. The one I have is most likely from 1970s, and from what I could find there are at least white, yellow and black varieties of this same model.

There are 96 separate switches, giving a quarter-hour resolution to the timer.

The knob in the middle adjusts the entire time. You can't separately turn hour and minute hands. Also, you can't lazily assume AM or PM, as the timer hand is in 24h format. The adjustment is pleasantly tactile and audible.

The clock in action is very silent. I'm generally annoyed if I can hear the tic-toc of a mechanical clock, but here it's really subtle.

In contrast to this the relay inside is quite noisy, I wouldn't want to be sleeping nearby when it switches on. There's a single button on top of the clock to override the switches.

The timer switches caused a few moments of head scratching. I've understood you usually create "zones" for on and off time ranges, but here each switch acts as a flip-flop. So you only change two switches to create a time range. This may also pose some limits to how the timer can be used, but I didn't go out of my way to test different configurations.

Turning switches on very near the 24h hand doesn't often work well, and trying to push the hand past a set switch (for testing purposes) feels a little suspect too. The device works best when the time is set knowingly well beforehand.

The clock invites romantic notions of an electro-mechanical "smart home" before the internet era, as it looks like more of a household item rather than something for the workplace/garage.

You know, in times past, people would wake up and move physically to their workplaces, as if parts of a huge clockwork. As your alarm rings, the porridge and coffee would already be heating up.

It's unlikely you could use this for activating an oven, but perhaps a separate cooktop, toaster or a water heater may be turned on before the alarm clock (separate) would ring.

Or, turn on a separate radio and also make it turn off as you've left. This is already something many later alarm clocks would do anyway.

I did test an USB mini-fan, but then preferred to operate it with a more current timing mechanism.

I'm thinking of a scenario where the clock turns on an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi, it does something for 15 minutes, and is shut off. From a power consumption standpoint it might be better to use a low-power Pi directly and have it on 24h...

So, ultimately, it might be best to use the old Electro Boy as a cool-looking clock.

Industrial electronic timers and timing computers are still produced under the (Hugo) Muller brand. Based on their website this became their main product in the 1980s.